They shouldn't, of course. This is a fundamental notion of the Web Dream: you don't really need a commodity to get rich. People will pay for ... your concept! And clearly, Suck had found a marketable concept. Which meant it was time to Sell Off. "We never wanted to be a business," Joey says. "It was against everything we stood for. Of course we wanted to sell out. The first thing to do would be to turn this into someone else's headache."

But he had to do it fast. Because who knows when that big Web bubble is going to burst? Everyone who works on Web sites thinks about this and thinks about it all the time. The Web is driving on novelty power right now, waiting for the mass market to arrive. But what if it doesn't? Or worse, what if it does only when big bandwidth finally gets here and the medium turns into ... TV! Who wants that? Not the Web Dreamer. TV is expensive to produce, and it reaches for the lowest common denominator as a way to make it pay off. If the Web metastasizes into that, bye-bye class media. The bubble bursts, and you're left with nothing but bubble goo to show for your troubles. And who can sell bubble goo?

The Web Dream is what smart kids across America - smart kids around the world - are dreaming. They might not trust in God or Family and they sure as hell don't believe in Country; they believe in Themselves, and in the power of their cleverly customizable, infinitely scalable, robust and ubiquitous, interactive, pull-down-menu Dreams.

And why not? Here's a cheap and easy-to-use medium that lets anyone seize the attention of the planet. All you have to do is show the fools how to use it RIGHT NOW. And what do you have to lose, you who have nothing? It'll hardly cost a dime, and you might just get rich doing it. Fuck waiting in line for your turn. Piss in the milk of the oligarchy. Don't Let's Make a Deal, and for God's sake, don't take what Carol Merril is holding in the box. Take the money. Then run like hell.

Except that our Sucksters did not get rich.

When they sold their three-month-old site in November 1995, they were promised nice stock options in Wired Ventures as well as comfortable raises to continue Sucking full time. They also got to hire writers, an illustrator, and their own engineer. But the Dream has yet to fully pay out - they must continue to work for a living. "I need a book deal," Joey says wistfully, and, of course, venally. Joey's heard that some magazine writer who occasionally writes about the Net got a US$300,000 advance. "I want to get on that book gravy train," he says.

(Note to publishers: Joey has a name for his proposed book, which would be a call to arms for the Web-dreaming digerati: Sell Out! Carl and I argue that a better name, a name with a more doomed, forward tilt might be: Sold Out. But Joey, as usual, is adamant: Sell Out! He explains that the title is advice to the young Web entrepreneur, not an epitaph. "Sell out!" he says. "With an exclamation point.")

Joey, who's been driving my rental, slows down so we can scan this gloomy, fast-food- and strip-mall-infested Berkeley boulevard in search of a rib joint. Joey's been driving, partly because Carl doesn't know his way around town. In fact, the owlish Carl rarely leaves the office. He's been living in the place, sleeping on a bunkbed eerily placed right there in HotWired's office - a young capitalist revolutionary unable or unwilling to disengage from the Movement. He usually gets up when the advertising department arrives for work in the morning. But if he sleeps through that, Joey &AMP Co. know better than to wake him. Carl is the kind of guy who, when anyone deliberately rousts him from a deep sleep, shrieks in a terrifying manner.

Now Joey, it should be noted, is decidedly Untired. I think it's fair to say that despite his whining and complaining, Joey is energized, not enervated, by Suck's success. Which is a curious phenomenon: sometimes in life, a person can be slowly leeched to death by the same thing that makes his beloved partner grow....

"What's the lede on your story?" Joey asks me for the third time. Baiting me for the zillionth.